Bill McCoy: RESTful And Social Internet Applications
Bill McCoy calls attention to one requirement for modern web programs that limits the audience of developers somewhat. He recommends greater simplification, particularly avoiding requiring developers to write XPath instructions.
It's an interesting point. Basic XPath instructions are really not that hard for programmers to understand.
Most programmers understand the concept of directory paths or else they are not much good for doing any good for coding programs that do file I/O or relate to the web at all.
And most programmers these days probably know what regular expressions look like, either from contact with them in C, PERL, Java, Ruby, etc.
XPath is basically just directory path syntax combined with regular expression syntax. There are more features and nuances there, but that is the crux of it.
Web developers of the graphical artist type might not understand XPath - but they don't have to understand it. They do layouts, art, color balancing, text/backround contrasting, etc.
They do not write SQL code in most cases. So they will not need to do XPath constraints XForms documents or XSLT stylesheets. Other people will do that stuff.
However, that is not to say that more programmers using XForms - and greater speed of development with XForms - would not result if drag-and-drop/property-sheet interfaces could generate/modify the XPath expressions in the forms documents. Just like most programmers prefer to use a powerful IDE and some still prefer to use vi, there will still be some people and occasions for writing/editing XPath expressions directly.
In most cases, I would expect XPath expressions in XForms to be generated and maintained by the software that selects data sets and does the persistent-object-to-XML mapping. That is likely going to be a GUI, probably in an IDE. Software is very good at doing those kind of database-programmer GUIs these days, particular IDE software.
Bill McCoy: RESTful And Social Internet Applications:
It's an interesting point. Basic XPath instructions are really not that hard for programmers to understand.
Most programmers understand the concept of directory paths or else they are not much good for doing any good for coding programs that do file I/O or relate to the web at all.
And most programmers these days probably know what regular expressions look like, either from contact with them in C, PERL, Java, Ruby, etc.
XPath is basically just directory path syntax combined with regular expression syntax. There are more features and nuances there, but that is the crux of it.
Web developers of the graphical artist type might not understand XPath - but they don't have to understand it. They do layouts, art, color balancing, text/backround contrasting, etc.
They do not write SQL code in most cases. So they will not need to do XPath constraints XForms documents or XSLT stylesheets. Other people will do that stuff.
However, that is not to say that more programmers using XForms - and greater speed of development with XForms - would not result if drag-and-drop/property-sheet interfaces could generate/modify the XPath expressions in the forms documents. Just like most programmers prefer to use a powerful IDE and some still prefer to use vi, there will still be some people and occasions for writing/editing XPath expressions directly.
In most cases, I would expect XPath expressions in XForms to be generated and maintained by the software that selects data sets and does the persistent-object-to-XML mapping. That is likely going to be a GUI, probably in an IDE. Software is very good at doing those kind of database-programmer GUIs these days, particular IDE software.
Bill McCoy: RESTful And Social Internet Applications:
It seems to me that if declarative model-based approaches to application construction are going to take off, advocates need to change the rules, and stop trying to oversell programmers and scripters on non-programmatic approaches. Instead we should create new classes of tools that really are for non-programmers, that do things like hide the complexities of XML Schema and XPath. When the day comes that non-programming users are really building production-level RIAs, I'll wager long odds that they won't be doing so by editing XML XPath node-set expressions in Notepad.
posted by John Collins | 2:14 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home